1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to personal organizers, and more particularly, to methods and apparatuses for efficiently generating and linking documents to contacts of a personal organizer.
2. Description of the Related Art
As people's personal and business schedules have come to be more complicated, more and more people have come to rely on personal organizer programs. Generally speaking, personal organizers assist users in keeping track of events though the use of calendars that may be displayed in any number of suitable viewing formats (i.e., daily, weekly, monthly and yearly). As appreciated by those who use personal organizers, managing busy home and business events is made much more efficient when an organizer's full potential is utilized. By way of example, a user may set organizer tickler alarms which alert the user of upcoming "to-do" tasks, meetings and events.
Most organizers are also equipped with capabilities for storing and keeping track of a user's personal and business contacts. Typically, a contact's information may include the contact's name, business title, work address, home address, work telephone number, and home telephone number. The user's contacts are typically arranged in columns for easy viewing and access. Although organizers do a superb job at organizing events and contacts, many users tend to expend a great deal of time and effort corresponding with their contacts.
By way of example, some business users correspond with numerous supplier contacts, distributor contacts, buyer contacts and employee contacts on a daily basis. Preparing such correspondences typically requires: (1) locating the contact's information stored in the user's organizer contact list; (2) copying the contact's full name and title; (3) selecting and copying the contact's appropriate address; (4) locating and launching the user's word processor; (5) formatting the user's return address; (6) filling in the contacts name, title, and address; (7) preparing a standard response in the body of the letter; and (8) inputting the user's signature block. As can be appreciated, responding to daily correspondence can be a very time consuming task, especially when a majority of responses are standard boilerplate type responses.
A further organizational problem associated with corresponding with contacts is keeping track of whether appropriate responses have been forwarded to selected contacts. That is, although a user's organizer is able to keep a detailed compilation of each contact's identifying information (i.e., address, phone numbers, and e-mail), the user is generally unable to ascertain (with any reasonable efficiency) whether appropriate correspondences have been prepared and sent to each contact.
Conventionally, when a user needs to verify that one of its contacts received an appropriate response, the user will unfortunately be forced to search through computer directories in an attempt to identify documents having titles that somewhat resemble a response the contact. To verify that a selected document is indeed the correct document, the user will then be required to launch a word processor to view the document. If the selected document is not the correct response, the user will once again perform a search through the computer directory and re-launch the word processor. Consequently, the user is unable to time efficiently determine whether responses have been prepared to selected contacts, and if responses were prepared, locating the appropriate response document is time consuming and wasteful.
In view of the foregoing, what is needed are methods and apparatuses for efficiently generating a letter to a selected contact of an organizer program, and linking the generated letter to the selected contact. Further, there is a need for an organizer program that facilitate the generation of standard response letters directly from the organizer program.